News - 2016

Big data promises to yield substantial returns, but exploiting it in order to see measurable business results can be challenging. How can businesses use these new technologies to see measurable results and ROI?

The digital revolution doesn’t just stop at the classical payment card. On the contrary: Mobile Digital Payment solutions providing a new way of convenience, that makes payment processes much leaner – and even smarter.

Much has been spoken about Fintech companies gaining traction over traditional banks with legacy systems and slow-to-act corporate hierarchies. Corporate expectations and new payment market entrants are putting pressure on the banks to innovate the traditional correspondent banking model for cross-border payments.

Is there room left for a European payments infrastructure as we the American infrastructure is already there and entering the European market, accompanied by the Chinese? Does the next reality in transactions means the end of an European infrastructure?

There is no doubt financial services were crying out for some variation. The existing bastions in the financial sector had been stuck in their ICT silos and long-term planning for quite some time. And so the only place where real innovation was going to come from was from outside …

​Whilst data is fitting as the currency of the new digital economy, some have proposed that APIs could be the oxygen of the same! Seen in the likes of airbnb, uber, open efficient APIs allows for an extension and escalation of the platform successfully.

The current minimum European AML rules have resulted in differences between member states’ AML/KYC requirements. While the regulator pushes to a risk-based approach, member states and financial institutions are left to interpret AML regulations as they see fit, leading to different processes for CDD across Europe and its players...

How will current regulatory developments re-shape the future payment landscape in Europe? There are fundamental changes happening expressing the EU commission’s and EU regulator’s desire to reshape the payment industry for years to come.

According to an article in Forbes, every financial institution in the world has some sort of internal R&D effort aimed at understanding how the Blockchain will effect their business. And in 2016, "many will be moving past the thinking and testing-the-waters stage and onto product development stage” (Coindesk).

Lots has been shared about PSD-II, Access to the Account, Instant Payments and the fast changes by API technologies. Douwe Lycklama (CEO Innopay) will moderate a fierce debate amongst key experts and thought-leaders of the European payment landscape.

News - 2015

Rolf will share insightful facts & figures on ecommerce, international trends and online shopping preferences in different countries. His case study on Cross-border eCommerce Import & Export Europe and China will highlight the particularities of Chinese ecommerce and the perceived barriers to enter this enormous market.

Payments have become “a commodity service” . This is a commonly heard message. Given the fact that large international players like Google, Apple, Facebook enter the payments space, there must be more value and/or strategic leverage for payments services.

Changing innovations and disruptions in payments have a big impact on retail banking as it defines customer interactions and transactions. How should retail banking stay ahead of technologies and new behaviors?

For years, the industry innovated to make the payment process for the customer as simple as possible. But with the simplicity came a price. Molding different instruments into one interface, are we heading to the point when there is nothing more to innovate?

In this era, where trends and businesses are shaped by speedily changing technologies, the update of regulations has to accelerate to keep pace with market realities. In Europe, PSD-2 will soon be in place and Third Party Payment (TPP) service providers will have direct access to customer accounts.

Envision a European network of payments, in any format, made anywhere, and processed in real time. Would the surmounting the challenge of this set up outweigh the benefits and cost savings for consumers and businesses?

Since mobile has become yesterday's news, what will be key retail transaction technology to watch out for? This is the question for every FinTech company in payments as market players jostle for that slice of the pie.

Vincent Brennan will present the Euro Banking Association’s latest opinion paper on the growth of ‘electronic Alternative Payments’ (eAPs). In this vision the banking infrastructure and the eAP world can accelerate by interoperating with the SEPA and cards infrastructures through an interoperable API infrastructure.

FinTech has grown very large over the past years: worldwide more than USD 4 billion (2014 est.) is invested in FinTech startups and to a large extend (>25%) into payment technology companies. The Payment industry has been highly innovative long before FinTech became something.

The online world offers business the opportunity to re-engineer business processes, and gain economies of scale through automation and reach. Online Identity, thus far has been resistant to change, with manual backend process being the norm, with highly localised approaches.

Digital Identity services have the potential to radically change the retail and payment landscape. The ongoing digital transformation of society leads to more and more electronic interaction between users and merchants, institutions and governments.

News

The key #infrastructure to unlock the EU market #SEPA

14 February 2012

Antonio Bracaglia of Poste Italiane will speak about the voyage of OSCar from the drawing board as a R&D project,...

...all the way to the operational challenges that had to be overcome to arrive at the current pilot phase with transactions in a real life situation. Due to its increasing business, Poste Italiane has joined the OSCar Consortium with the intention of demonstrating the quality of new SEPA standards and to adopt them into a new e-payments platform, called TITAN.
OSCar is an international initiative that aims at facilitating and speeding up the implementation of the SEPA Cards Standards in the terminal-to-acquirer domain.

Take-aways:
•definition of security and functional requirements for new payment products
•certification and type approval processes
•implementation and testing of new protocols
•risk analysis and risk assessment

Antonio Bracaglia – OSCar Steering Committe member / E-payments development - Poste Italiane, has been working in standardisation SEPA initiatives for many years and will share his experience on April 19th.